The end of the year was marred by a series of high-profile terrorist attacks both within the North Caucasus and close to its borders. First, a car packed with explosives blew up in Pyatigorsk. That was followed by two major explosions in Volgograd.

A funny message has been circulating on Russian social media networks. If you do a search using the words "mayors arrested," you will get multiple results for the cities of Rybinsk, Berdsk, Yaroslavl, Makhachkala and Astrakhan.

Russia has taken a more confrontational approach toward Europe and is attempting to turn instead toward Asia. A particularly revealing evidence of this shift is the new Far East policy adopted by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev during a recent government commission session held in Komsomolsk-on-Amur.

No sooner had one election ended than the Kremlin began preparing for new elections to be held one year from now. Former Yamal-Nenets autonomous district Deputy Governor Vladimir Vladimirov has been appointed as the new governor of the Stavropol region, replacing former Governor Valery Zerenkov.

Elections will definitely reappear in Russia at some point, but it is still too early to say it has already happened. The recent elections in Moscow and Yekaterinburg were more of a test run, and although they did not cause any radical changes in the country overall, they do serve as positive examples to be emulated elsewhere.

The Kremlin is clearly worried, and not just about the mayoral race in Moscow. The anxiety can be seen in the fact that President Vladimir Putin skipped his vacation in order to spend two weeks meeting with a dozen senior politicians from regions where elections will be held.

During President Vladimir Putin's visit to Germany last week, he gave a television interview in which he stated that 654 nongovernmental organizations in Russia had received a total of $1 billion in foreign aid in the four months since the State Duma had passed a new law on NGOs.

The authorities have initiated an unprecedented campaign against nongovernmental organizations, conducting burdensome inspections of their offices in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Perm, Krasnodar, Vladivostok, Novosibirsk, Rostov-on-Don and dozens of other cities.

The Kremlin continued its campaign of replacing regional heads in the run-up to gubernatorial elections in September with the dismissal of former Zabaikalsky region Governor Ravil Geniatulin, who has held that post for almost 20 years, and the appointment of Just Russia State Duma Deputy Konstantin Ilkovsky as acting governor.

According to tradition, Russia's law enforcement officials started off the year by summing up the previous 12 months and making plans for the coming year at board meetings of the Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service.

One year before the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and 12 months before the term of former Dagestani leader Magomedsalam Magomedov was to expire, the Kremlin appointed a new leader in the volatile republic.

Although President Vladimir Putin's state-of-the-nation address last week was largely an amalgamation of vague promises devoid of strategic vision, his comments on the regions were concrete and meaningful.

Even when the Kremlin introduces a modest legislative initiative geared toward political reform, it often becomes ≠watered-down and ineffective by the time it gets put into practice. This is precisely what happened with the new bill on amending how Federation Council senators are selected. The bill passed both chambers of parliament and now awaits the president's signature.

The gubernatorial elections held last month in five regions were important primarily as a test run of the Kremlin's new system of "filtering" the selection of governors. The experiment was largely successful. But right after those elections, presidential administration head Sergei Ivanov announced that the municipal filter was too strict and would have to be significantly relaxed.

The Kremlin had hoped that after the March presidential election gave President Vladimir Putin a decisive victory, the protest movement would die down, the regime would gain political legitimacy for another six years, and Putin would have a free hand to continue with business as usual. But that didn't happen.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Wednesday he opposed the creation of an international tribunal to prosecute those who shot down a Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine, hours before a U.N. vote on such a proposal.

Authorities in Central Asia's former Soviet "stans" are taking draconian measures to stamp out militant Islam, but their harsh methods and the absence of democratic politics risk provoking a backlash that could bring even greater instability.